06 May 2018 1:59 AM

Here they come again, waving identity cards. The people who wrecked Britain in the first place now want to make it even worse.

Having flung our borders wide to anyone who cared to wander in, they want to use this as an excuse to introduce identity cards.

Former Labour Home Secretary Alan Johnson, and the incessant Blairite cheerleader and Times columnist David Aaronovitch, are noisily trying to dig up this grisly political corpse.

But Mr Aaronovitch spoiled things a bit by admitting that such a move would have to come ‘in tandem with an amnesty’.

He is right. Even on its own terms, the scheme is far too late to solve the migration crisis.

Millions of new people are already here, many hundreds of thousands quite illegally, and no conceivable British government would ever try to remove them all.

It can cope with a few symbolic expulsions, to make itself look tough. But can you imagine what would happen if it attempted a mass round-up of everyone who has ever climbed out of the back of a lorry and vanished into the dusk?

I can. It would explode in their faces.

The unintended consequence of mass registration will, in reality, be – as Mr Aaronovitch rightly says – an official amnesty for illegal migrants.

In which case it will be difficult to object to a future amnesty for the next lot of illegals who arrive, once there are so many of them here that it becomes an issue.

So, if identity cards don’t actually solve that problem, what do we have left? A threat to your liberty and mine.

These Blairites come from a broadly Marxist tradition (which I suspect Mr Aaronovitch understands better than Mr Johnson), so they have nothing much against centralised state power over the individual.

Mr Johnson is a nicer man who can be forgiven much because of his beautiful and moving memoir of his childhood, This Boy. But he shouldn’t be let off when he gets things wrong.

The other evening, at a celebration of the genius of the great writer and Englishman George Orwell, Mr Johnson told me (in his usual charming way) that he thought he might have persuaded Orwell to endorse our regime of CCTV cameras, surveillance of emails and increased police powers.

I do not think so. In his greatest work, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell warned quite specifically against a nightmare world of hidden cameras and microphones, and arbitrary rule, much of it excused by a supposed external threat from an ever-changing enemy. I reread it often in case I forget this warning.

I am confident he would have recognised in present-day Britain the hardening outlines of an oppressive surveillance state in which the individual is powerless.

One of the keys to its operation will be identity cards.

That is their real point. They were quite useless for any of their claimed purposes when we last had them between 1939 and 1952.

I can find no instance of any spy or fifth-columnist having been caught through their use in that period.

But hundreds of busybodies and petty tyrants used them to make life difficult for innocent individuals going about their lawful business.

One of my favourite stories about this era concerns one British Jew, Myer Rubinstein, who decided not to register.

I assume he did so because he very wisely thought that, if a Nazi invasion ever came, registration would mean certain death for him, as the identity registers of so many other European countries had meant death for so many other Jews.

He went undetected without such a card, throughout the Second World War and for many years afterwards.

As for the supposed use of such cards in ‘establishing your identity’, this spectacularly did not prove to be the case for Charles Jarman, leader of the Seamen’s Union who, in 1945, was ludicrously arrested on suspicion of having led a smash-and-grab raid.

Police held him for hours despite his identity card showing ‘who he was’.

This sort of thing led, thanks to the fury and persistence of a single High Court judge, to the abolition of these useless, oppressive, breathing licences.

Actually, such cards prove nothing, except that the State has issued them. Very few criminal cases or frauds are about the identity of the culprit.

Terrorists, we may be sure, will have the very best and most convincing identity cards of all.

But if we submit to them, we will all have lost something vital. For centuries, in the English-speaking countries, the State and its officers have had to identify themselves to us, rather than the other way round.

This is the right relationship between citizen and government. It is like the presumption of innocence and jury trial, a practical and vital proof that we are free men and women.

To accept identity cards would be to turn our whole free constitution upside down, and place the State above our heads rather than under our feet, where it belongs.

If we do this, we will take a huge step back towards being serfs.

And we will be spitting on the inheritance of liberty our parents handed on to us, and betraying our children and grandchildren.

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10 July 2017 1:31 PM

Several readers chided me for writing about my experiences at what is now called 'Her Majesty's Passport Office' (this new self-consciously 'Royal' title is an interesting development in itself which I will return to at the end).

Some seem to think we should accept almost any treatment at the hands of government, because, well, that is what we should do. I am sorry for them. Others accepted whole and unexamined that questionable claim that this sort of procedure protects us against terror. Really? You cannot go to HMPO without an appointment made some days in advance. In the course of making that appointment you allow the authorities, if they choose, to make detailed enquiries about you on their own databases. Had I been any sort of threat, they would have had plenty of time to reject me, or make preparations for whatever threat I posed.

Next, what is a passport anyway? It is a document made necessary by governments, who insist on them as a condition of allowing you into their country. This used not to be so, but now it is, and that is all there is to it. There is no need to make heavy weather out of it. If someone wants one, and is prepared to pay a reasonable fee to help cover the costs, he or she should have one without fuss. It is not some special privilege, just an inconvenience imposed on us by government, which government has a duty to minimise.

Ever since I travelled back from Ukraine a few years ago and found myself sitting next to the proudly beaming owner of a smart new British passport who was plainly Ukrainian born and raised and could not speak a word of English, I have ceased to regard my possession of this document as any sort of privilege.

In the UK, they are issued, by a quirk, under the Royal Prerogative. So they are not governed by an Act of Parliament, though Parliament has recently accumulated powers to remove or withdraw them from certain people on the basis of their behaviour , powers I regard as unwarranted. The liberty to travel should not be conditional on behaviour. If we want to curtail such liberty, the Bail Act, TPIMs or the prison system are available. Otherwise that freedom is or ought to be absolute. What is the point of trying to pick us up on supposed faults in our photographs so minor they cannot even be described, if they exist at all, and petty fusses about the wording of obviously legitimate supporting letters? To let us know that we are powerless supplicants, that is the point of it. And I object to that.

In a free country it is more or less the duty of government to issue such documents to all who ask for them. Why should it be otherwise? Those who write in saying how easily they renewed their passports (lucky them!) have simply received the service they should have received as a matter of course. Good for them. I wrote what I did because I didn't, and had the impression I was not alone There was never any reason why it should be complicated. Indeed, in the dear dead days of the British Visitors' Passport, valid across the free half of the Continent, you could pick one up by appearing at an office in almost any town with birth certificate and photo, in about half an hour. I think it cost about thirty bob.

If the rules were to be codified, that is what they would have to say. It should be the opposite of what happens in unfree countries. Unfree countries, such as the USSR was, were notable for their use of foreign passports as a privilege, to be granted occasionally and handed back to the authorities on return. They also liked to deprive troublesome people of citizenship. What Soviet citizens called a 'passport' was in fact an internal identity card, incessantly demanded at almost every opportunity, and necessary for almost every activity apart from sleeping. I find that increasingly people in this country demand either my driving licence, which I do not carry, or my passport (which I also do not carry when not travelling abroad) for such things as hotel registration. Generally they back down in the face of absolute refusal, but most people, I fear, give in. In the USA, one is now asked for a government-issued identity document to take the train from Washington DC to New York City. How odd that I used to think it oppressive and absurd that the same rule applied for the similar journey between Moscow and Leningrad. Amusingly, a few years ago I managed to travel from London to Dublin without any need to show any sort of document. I wonder if it's still possible?

For of course the excuse of 'protecting' us against 'terror', a process in which we rejoice the terrorists' hearts by bartering our ancient liberties for the illusion of safety, always trumps reason and proportion. This is why at one major US airport passengers are repeatedly threatened, over the public address, that they will be arrested and banned form travel for making jokes about 'security'. I fear to name it lest I am tracked down and banned.

It wouldn't work if people didn't fall for it, and most people, alas, seem to do so. Hence the blizzard of snotty attacks on me yesterday, mitigated by a few shining examples of open-minded defence of liberty against petty authority, for which much thanks.

I replied in detail to one contributor who asked why I had gone through this process at all. For those who missed it, the answer was '

'I told you the reasons were 'dull but sensible'. No complaining, from now on. You asked for it. Like many others, I have for several years needed two passports because I travelled in the Middle East and my travel included Israel. The presence of an Israeli entry or exit stamp in your passport means that several Muslim countries will refuse to let you in. And no, you cannot always just ask the Israelis to leave your passport unstamped, especially at the entry point from the Gaza strip.

Both these passports are now close to expiry and I needed to renew one of them. But to do so I have to present both existing passports to HMPO. One of the close-to-expiry passports contains two US visas (which I need to enter that country, for reasons I really won't go into here) obtained at the cost of months of paperwork, hours of queueing (about which I do not complain as other countries can take whatever measures they like to defend their own borders and choose whom they will let in, and I wish we were more fussy) and hundreds of pounds. They remain valid for many years, even after the passport in which they are inserted has expired. I was simply not prepared to risk this document in the post or to courier services. The only solution was to attend in person. For this I paid £128.

On the question of 'security', I really do not see why such an office has to be so closely guarded. I also could not and cannot see any reason for the chilly and pointless attempts to question the validity of my (perfectly valid) photographs or of the letter written to the precise dictation of an official of the HMPO, except to show that I was a powerless supplicant, presumed to be dishonest and of ill-intent, and they were all-powerful. Frankly, Soviet bureaucracy was easier to cope with than this because the USSR was a totalitarian country and so this sort of thing was to be expected, and Russian humour always tended to break through. Paradoxically, US bureaucracy (rooted in that country's strong suppressed Germanic culture, I tend to think) can be even worse. Feel real fear if any uniformed person in the USA ever addresses you as 'Sir!'.

AS to all those who have written here attacking me for being dismayed by my treatment, you will get the state you deserve. If you think it should be above your head, rather than beneath your feet, and that you should serve the state rather than the other way round, that is what you will get. Those who prefer the other arrangement have to stand up for it. English people used to be good at standing up for liberty. Now (perhaps as they become flaccid watchers of 'Love Island' they are becoming willing proficient serfs who will turn on those who assert their independence, and cheer on the authorities. Poor old John Hampden ('Who was he?', they ask) was wasting his time.'

Now, as to 'Her Majesty's Passport Office' (once simply 'The Passport Office'), I had a spat with the Home Office a few years ago about the fact that, long after the plan for Identity Cards had been dropped, the country was still dotted with 'Identity and Passport offices' and we still had an 'Identity and Passport Service'. As I wrote in February 2012 'Why do we still have an 'Identity and Passport Service'?

'I asked the Home Office, and they treated it as a silly question and snapped dismissively that it would cost too much to change the name. I said I was sure that the plaque on the Home Secretary's door didn't still say 'Alan Johnson', but they didn't get the joke.

'Then I asked the Department for Education, as it is now known, how much it had cost to get rid of the stupid New Labour name it used to have. For the entire department (far bigger than the Passport Office), it cost £8,995, small change in Government terms.'

Obviously they got over these cost worries, because in May the following year it got its Royal Title The government said at the time that ' The inclusion of "Her Majesty’s" in the title recognises that passports are the property of the Crown, bear the royal coat of arms and are issued under the royal prerogative' . But this had always been the case when it was just the Passport Office. I never asked how much it cost.

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12 July 2014 11:37 AM

First can I reassure Mr Djilo that I in no way resent being compared to Groucho Marx? I’ve never found the Marx brothers very funny myself, but I assume the fault is in me, and know that many others, whose taste I respect, do think they’re funny, – so I’d still say that Groucho has contributed far more to human happiness than his Trier-born namesake. Not that Karl was humourless, he had a good line in heavy-handed sarcasm.

But I do rather resent what Michael Kenny writes: ‘The point about ID cards is that we live in an ever shrinking world in which we have an ever greater number of people willing and able to commit atrocities on an almost apocalyptic scale. The means for private individuals and groups to carry out clandestine 9/11 style attacks wasn't really an issue in horse & cart ye olde englande, and that is why the quaint liberties and freedoms Peter romanticises over were the standard of the day. The present day predicament is further exacerbated by lax immigration controls and the multiculturalism our three party state subscribes to. That means ever increasing numbers of foreign peoples moving about various countries about whom we know little or nothing. In short, the kind of societal and cultural chaos which prevails in the West today needs the necessary safeguards in place to ensure that that chaos doesn't result in catastrophe of one or another. I'm no more in favour of ID cards (etc) than the next person. But I have to concede that as a nation we have (unfortunately) fundamentally altered the make-up of our society, and as such a price will have to be paid.’

Because my response has to be ‘So what?’

I must mention here the old question of ‘What does the ‘D’ stand for in ‘ID cards’, which I think important because the use of this strange non-acronym is a symptom of the general thoughtlessness of so many when discussing these things.

There is nothing ‘quaint’ about restraints on power. They are as valid now as they ever were, and the behaviour of the Western powers after September 11 2011 (Guantanamo, extraordinary rendition, secret prisons, waterboarding, vastly increased surveillance, ‘Homeland Security’, the Civil Contingencies Act, catch-all laws against ‘glorifying terrorism’) would have been immensely worse had they not been restrained by Bills of Rights whose provisions are as modern as the Internet – framed as they were by men who knew well the universal, timeless character of power, and its tendency to corrupt those who wield it.

Tyranny can arise amidst modern technology and buildings, and has done so many times in the past century. Imprisonment without trial, torture chambers, arbitrary execution have all flourished in the age of radio, TV, the computer and the jet engine. And so safeguards against these things are just as necessary in such times. The need to defend liberty will never be out of date.

The September 11 2001 attacks were carried out by persons legally in the United States with valid visas and identity documents. So far as I know the same is true of the culprits of the 7th July 2005 bombings in London.

I fail to see how obliging law-abiding British subjects to carry identity cards would in any way overcome ‘ever increasing numbers of foreign peoples moving about various countries about whom we know little or nothing. In short, the kind of societal and cultural chaos which prevails in the West’.

The solution to that is to control your own borders. If you do not (and we do not), then registration of the law-abiding lawful residents will in no way inhibit the behaviour of the unregistered, unrecorded non-residents, who will by definition be spared from the need to carry such cards.

Registration of existing residents is a wholly illogical response to the problem Mr Kenny cites. In any case, what use are such documents. A resident person, born and brought up here and properly registered, could perfectly easily decide to pursue a criminal terrorist course. How exactly would compelling him to carry such a card inhibit him? On the contrary, anyone who placed any value on such things would therefore be obliged to let such a person pass. He has an ‘ID’ card. Therefore he is assumed ( as were the September 11 murderers) to be legitimate.

The problems of whether ‘ID’ cards can be forged, manipulated – and the problem of what they actually declare - are not addressed. They cannot be. Such cards are useless in combating terror or crime Such a card merely says that the authorities (if they issued the card) believe the bearer to be who the card says he is. The police officer who takes this on trust may well be making the biggest mistake of his life. They are not merely useless against real terror, which is very well-organized and always has perfect documentation. They provide dangerous false reassurance to the bureaucratic mind.

Their only use is to allow the state to have more power over the law-abiding, and more information about the law-abiding than it could normally gather. And, as I say, to reverse the proper relation between state and individual.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn yearned for left-wing western intellectuals to be granted a brief stay in the Gulag, and to hear the guards bawl at them, as they marched meekly off to their slave-work in the dawn twilight, the words ‘Ruki Nazad!’ (Hands behind your backs!), and to realise that they would actually have to adopt this humiliating, defenceless posture or be beaten until they did. He reckoned it might cure them of their fellow-travelling.

In the same spirit I do wish all these ‘ID card’ merchants could be transported back to the days of the Warsaw Pact, and find out what it is like to be in a country where the police can stop anyone when they feel like it and demand ‘Dokumenti, pajalsta!’. Once you’ve actually seen and felt what it’s like to be a state serf, perhaps you’ll value your freedom bit more. In the meantime, trust me. It’s important, and nothing to do with ‘Ye Olde England’. Shame on you.

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11 July 2014 11:45 AM

A Mr Spencer says he may have ceased to be my ‘biggest fan’, apparently because I am prepared to listen to, and see good qualities in, some of my opponents. If he regards this as a fault, then I shall be pleased to lose him as a fan of any size.

Mr Bunker, that man of mystery still prevented by unnamed forces from even considering the possibility that God might exist, nonetheless has no difficulty with carrying a compulsory state-issued card, and registering himself with the authorities. That, I’m afraid, is a reflection upon him, and perhaps on what he is used to in Germany. The states which make up modern Germany were almost all despotisms in which the inhabitant was the unquestioning servant of that state. If the state accuses you of a crime in such jurisdictions, your guilt is presumed in practice (though in modern times lip service may be paid to the presumption of innocence) and you may be confined almost indefinitely while you await a trial in which all those who rule on your guilt will be employees of the state. You will be expected to co-operate with your own prosecution. In all matters you must acount for yourself to the state, rather than the other way round.

In Britain until recently we had a different tradition, in which the state , in theory and practice, was the servant of the individual. That is why in Britain the police must identify themselves to us, but we do not have to identify ourselves to the police. As recently as the 1950s,we still had enough guts, and enough good judges, to throw off the useless identity card system imposed on us for no good reason during the war. The introduction of identity cards in this country would complete and make irreversible the process by which a free country has, slice by salami slice, been turned into a continental jurisdiction. Such cards are the material embodiment of the presumption of guilt, and of the subservience of the individual to the state. As I’ve often said, those who won’t worship God will usually end up worshipping earthly power instead.

‘Rosaleen’ makes the invariable false assumption of Irish nationalist enthusiasts, that opposition to the criminal terror gangs of the IRA and the ‘Loyalist’ equivalents is in some way anti-Irish. On the contrary, it is simply pro-human.(anti-kidnap, anti-abduction, anti burning people to death, anti-blowing people to bits, etc etc) . Does she really think I am either ignorant of, or unmoved by, or unashamed by the Irish famine? I would urge her to read, at least, this article

Mr ‘F’ says I ‘never’ criticize the Labour Party. This is simply not true. I have been a newspaper columnist now, with a small break, since the late 1990s. In that time I have also written several books on public policy, and taken part in numberless broadcasting appearances and debates. In these appearances, articles, and books, I think Mr ‘F’ will have no difficulty in finding quite a lot of criticism of the Labour Party, in and out of government.

What he actually means is that I refuse to join in a partisan campaign to save the Tory party from its deserved fate at the next election. Why should I? I loathe the Tory party for the same reason as I loathe the Labour Party. It is the enemy of Britain. But at least the Labour party offers itself to the public as a left-wing anti-British, pro-EU pro-crime anti-education party that despises the armed forces. The Tories , who are the same in all respects, lie about their aims and purpose and so occupy the seats in Parliament that should be held by a pro-British party. It is a matter of urgency that they are destroyed so that this change can happen.

The nature of the government under which we suffer will be identical whoever wins the next election. The nature of the future will be entirely different if the Tories collapse. I do indeed advise principled Conservatives to vote Labour (note the capital ‘C’ – those conservatives who have already abandoned the Tory Party forever have no need to do so). In this way they would achieve the same sort of government they seem to desire, but could also distance themselves from the shameful campaign of personal vilification being directed against Ed Miliband.

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02 September 2013 5:31 PM

The electronic mob has swung behind me for once. I, the Hated Peter Hitchens, am being pelted with praise on Twitter, for my recent assault on the Prime Minister and his contradictory, infantile and self-righteous desire to drop nice bombs on Damascus.

Nice bombs, by the way, explode, burn, kill, bereave, crush, rip, tear, scorch, amputate, maim, disfigure and disembowel in exactly the same way as ordinary bombs. But they have been launched by nice people in a good cause, so they are nicer than nasty bombs, in some mystical way.

I suspect the distinction is only visible inside the minds of those who demand that they be launched, and those who order them to be launched. I doubt very much if the service personnel who obey the orders (who tend to be free of illusions) can see the difference. And I am sure that those on the receiving end cannot.

But leave that to one side.

A lot of this praise is qualified with a formula that runs something like this. ‘Never thought I’d agree with Peter Hitchens’. ‘I’ll have to lie down now that I’ve found myself agreeing with Peter Hitchens’ , or ‘Amazing that Peter Hitchens has written something intelligent’.

Something similar happened in the pre-Twitter days of the Blair war on Iraq. Those who opposed the invasion eventually noticed that I too opposed it. I was even invited to speak on the platform at a ‘Stop the War’ rally. I declined, partly because (as I put it to them) I opposed the war for what they saw the ‘wrong reasons’

These were not pacifism (I am not a pacifist, and haven’t been one since my teens, when I quickly realised the huge and – to me – unacceptable implications of adopting this admirable position).

I saw it as an assault on national sovereignty which wasn’t in the interests of my country or of the USA, and for which no reasonable case had been made.

Also I couldn’t possibly speak from the same platform as those who denied Israel’s right to exist, especially as they claimed that the state resulting from Israel’s removal would be a ‘Free Palestine’. Whatever that state would be, I think we could guarantee absolutely that it wouldn’t be free. I couldn’t then, and can’t now, see what this questionable cause has to do with a desire for peace in the Middle East, a goal which depends entirely upon reasonable compromise.

The BBC, which had until the Iraq war been giving me an increasing number of invitations to discussion programmes, suddenly all but ceased to ask me on. It was faced with the impossible calculation which runs as follows : ‘Right wing person=bad person. Opponent of war = good person . This does not compute. He cannot really exist. Do not invite him on.’

For about two years, my invitations dwindled to almost nothing, except when they came from half-witted researchers who rang me up to ask me to defend the invasion, or the ‘war on terror’, or bombing, or torture, or Guantanamo, despite the fact that my easily-available published work opposed all these things. When I did occasionally get on to panel shows, audiences and presenters were often puzzled, as they also are by my attacks on the Tory Party.

The football or boxing-match model of politics seems to have entirely taken hold. You are on one side or the other. If you diverge, you have gone over to the other side.

Life is not actually like that.

But of course my new Twitter admirers of today know in their hearts that I am a monstrous reactionary. So while they cannot fault the facts or logic of my attack on the Syrian war, they are chary of giving me any kind of general endorsement, just as I am chary of welcoming their applause.

Mind you, a lot of the Left never read my own paper, the Mail on Sunday, or its sister the Daily Mail. Few even know that they are separate publications and that I write for only one of them. They prefer to excoriate them from a safe distance. If they did read them, they would know (apart from anything else) that both papers are pluralistic in offering prominent platforms to several different views, and that there are strong divergences among conservative voices.

Melanie Phillips and I, for instance, disagree quite strongly about the ‘war on terror’, Iran and the Iraq war. Max Hastings, Stephen Glover and I have all been among those urging caution over Syria. Quentin Letts tends to be a more traditional Tory, as does Andrew Roberts. The Daily Mail’s leader column last week was strongly critical of the rush to war. The MoS was highly doubtful about the Blair war, and was also among the very first in criticising the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo, and publishing the disturbing pictures of kneeling, shackled, blindfolded prisoners there. It has also taken a strong pro-liberty line in domestic matters, as have I.

No doubt many left wing anti-war people would dislike my stance on mass immigration (though they might be surprised by my consistent positions on liberty, identity cards and the forcing down of wages). I expect they would be hostile to my views on education largely because I voice them (though grammar schools are surely fairer to the poor than selection by wealth as we have now). I expect my most profound division with most left-wing people would come over the sexual revolution and illegal drugs.

This is because the modern left, far from being a social democratic movement dedicated to the bettering of the lives of the poor, has become , above all things, a liberationist movement dedicated to the greatest possible personal autonomy.

This autonomy, as it happens, cannot readily co-exist with strong monocultural settled nation states with powerful conscience-driven moral systems; nor can it coexist with a strong and influential Christianity, or with the tightly-knit united married families prescribed by that system.

That is why the greatest and most urgent passions of the left are often engaged in denouncing the Christian religion (sometimes dressed up with a bit of anti-Islamism, but essentially aiming at the Christian faith because it is the one whose strength or weakness affects them personally), and in pursuing a globalist multicultural internationalism.

And yet many of the left are also still as disgusted as I am by war. Their post-Christian ethic still rightly sees war as an evil in itself, very hard to justify. When their more advanced thinkers (like my late brother, and like whoever wrote Anthony Blair’s Chicago speech on the ‘Responsibility to Protect’) take these beliefs to their logical conclusions – namely idealistic war and nice bombs – they balk. In fact they are balking at a consequence of their own beliefs, the pursuit of globalism , the dismantling of borders and nations, the dismissal of absolute prohibitions on ends justifying means.

Good for them. But it will plainly take more than this to get them to question their own beliefs.

I don’t mind at all if these people loathe me personally. I can even see why they do. I used to be like them. But to any of them who like what I say about the Syria war, I make one request. Now read my books, read this indexed and archived blog. See if anything else I say might possibly make sense. Ask yourselves if the thing we have in common – a desire for the good – might perhaps be more important in the long run than the things which divide us. And let thought take the place of thoughtless, ill-informed scorn.

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17 April 2013 11:33 AM

I reproduce below a long (and rather snappish) attack on me, published by Michael Ward, a person I’ve never met (but who seems to dislike my views on illegal drugs) and much-posted on Twitter. I am responding to it because the ‘Times’ columnist and BBC favourite David Aaronovitch, who has pronounced that I am ‘wrong’ on the MMR subject, but cannot say why despite many challenges to do so from me, seems to be relying on this document as his justification.

Therefore the author of it has had the misfortune to have become a proxy for Ex-Comrade Aaronovitch. David is a former enthusiast of the late unlamented Communist Party of Great Britain, and has not, as far as I know, devoted much time to repudiating his past affiliation to the Party of Brezhnev and Andropov. He was also (to me unsurprisingly, as both projects were utopian, globalist, self-righteous, deluded, dishonest and violent) a keen supporter of Mr Blair’s idiotic and disastrous war on Iraq. A number of other people have also claimed that Mr Ward’s essay ‘demolishes’, ‘dismantles’ or ‘takes down’ my position. People often say this sort of thing, when what they mean is that they agree with my critic. This is one of those occasions, but because the MMR issue is still so important, I feel it necessary to respond where I otherwise wouldn’t bother.

… the essay is illustrated by a picture of me rather sheepishly holding a rifle in a gun shop in Idaho, taken during the 2008 Presidential election campaign. What this has to do with the subject of the MMR, I have no idea. Heaven knows there is no shortage of unflattering pictures of me (or indeed of accurate ones, which may be the same thing) on the web. So why this one? Could it perhaps be there to predispose liberal-minded readers against me? After all, guns are evil, are they not? So if I am holding one, I must be too. The author, I note, displays a picture of himself looking like a really cool dude, shades and all.

Then there are the puerile and unfunny jests about football, and the mystic, grandiose claims of the scientist to be the only person worthy to discuss scientific matters. We’ve had this out before. I yield absolutely to scientists on matters in which they are expert. But I see no reason why they should have special privileges in any argument which can be expressed in unspecialised terms. They have no special powers of logic, and their facts are just as easily examined as anyone else’s. And it seems to me that, in matters of the human heart, I know a good deal more than my critic has managed to pick up in all his ‘scientific’ life.

For instance, were I arguing that Dr Wakefield was right, or the MMR was dangerous, I would need to show my qualifications before doing so. I’ve no doubt my critic would prefer me to do one or both of these things, and it often seems, in his denunciation below, that he thinks I am doing so. But I am not. That is why he so furiously muddies the waters, with righteous rage and a didactic, overbearing manner, to try to give the impression that I am, and perhaps to persuade himself that I am..

His essay (including quotations from me) is almost 6,000 words long. As my own argument is clear, as it actually concerns the liberty of the subject and the freedom of the press rather than science, as I haven’t changed it in 12 years and as my critic in fact offers no evidence that I am factually incorrect or logically at fault, I won’t try to respond at the same length (though the whole thing is reproduced below for those who want a ready reference. Some people on Twitter have joked that the Internet will run out of electrons if this goes on).

I will instead try to explain what I think this is really about, and why it gets people so worked up.

The issue is, at heart, about the relation between the individual and the state. Is the state over our heads, or beneath our feet? Do we serve it, or does it serve us?

This was my main objection to the plan for identity cards (which had many practical justifications, some more convincing than others, none over-riding). Its introduction would have changed the relationship between the individual and the state, for the worse. Instead of the state having to justify its existence and presence to us, it would have been the other way round. This has terrible implications for freedom, the presumption of innocence, the powers of the police and the government. To a former Communist Party member (such as Mr Aaronovitch) or to any conventionally wise left-winger, I don’t imagine these things are particularly worrying. But they are to me.

What I find most striking about my critic’s response is that it could have been written by a machine. It contains not the faintest scrap of human sympathy for the parents who were unhappy about letting their children be given the MMR.

It also contains no scrap of understanding of what press freedom involves. The press must report such things as Dr Wakefield’s press conference. There is a risk that such whistle blowers may be wrong, but an equal risk that they may be right. Suppression is no answer to this conundrum. One of those who warned correctly about Thalidomide later raised concerns about another drug that turned out to be safe. But had he been right, and majority medical opinion is often wrong and governments are often wrong, and civil servants are often wrong, then he would have been a hero, loaded with honours.

I won’t , because it would take too long, list all the many newspaper stories about this controversy. But I might draw my critics’ attention to one in the ‘Sunday Times’ of 3rd August 1997 ‘Crying shame of the vaccination victims’, which mentions that the then Health Secretary, Tessa Jowell, took the ‘scare’ so seriously that she called a meeting of concerned parents and scientists to discuss it. What are the media supposed to do in such circumstances. Shut up? Or cover the story? Actually, the Daily Telegraph, the Independent. The Times, the Guardian, the London Evening Standard all reported extensively on it. The defence of the MMR by the authorities was fully reported in the Daily Mail. Why then did the worry spread? Well, because parents did not know who was right, and erred on the side of caution.

Sarah Boseley asked in ‘The Guardian’ of 3rd June 1999 that ‘Why then, in the face of all the evidence the scientific and public health communities can amass, does anybody worry about the safety of the MMR vaccine? Basically, because there is no longer the sort of trust in the scientific and medical community that once existed. Not only have they sometimes got it wrong, but their mistakes, thanks to newspapers and the media, have been widely disseminated. We are distrustful of drugs that may prove addictive or damaging to our health or our childrens'. The scare over GM foods is just the latest episode to reinforce our suspicion. It does not help that scientists are usually reluctant to speak out and criticise their colleagues. 'It is very difficult. People don't like to criticise people who are respected and employed,' said Dr [Mary]Ramsay [a consultant in public health medicine at the Public Health Laboratory Service]. And since government pronouncements are viewed with equal suspicion, it is left to each individual parent to decide whether the likes of Dr Wakefield are mavericks or lone radicals who have discovered something disturbing that we really ought to think hard about before we take our child to the vaccination clinic.’

And once doubts exist about a treatment, then it may take a long time to settle them. Whether my critic likes it or not, the question was still controversial in 2001, or why did the Blairs refuse to reveal their decision at that time (which he himself admits was a grave error), and why did their refusal attract such attention? The controversy was still in being in 2004, when Dr Wakefield and several colleagues retracted part of the 1998 paper. The General medical Council did not begin proceedings against Andrew Wakefield and his colleagues till July 2007. ‘The Lancet’ did not retract the 1998 paper until 2010. People don’t necessarily believe official reassurances. It is annoying of them, no doubt, but it is an important part of a free society that they are entitled to act in ways that the government doesn’t necessarily like. His repeated assertions that the controversy was over by 2001 are just that, assertions. Had it been so, then the withdrawal of the single jabs would not have led (as it has done) to the large gaps in immunity we now find.

All I am saying, all I have ever said, is that it would have been better to allow parents to give their children the single vaccine on the NHS, rather than abruptly withdrawing it. Many were so concerned that they spent precious savings or travelled abroad to obtain this vaccine. What kind of dolt refuses to recognise this strength of feeling, and seeks to bully those who suffer it?

When Andrew Wakefield’s original paper was published single vaccines were licensed in the UK and readily available to the British public. Andrew Wakefield recently wrote that though MMR vaccination uptake definitely fell after February 1998, use of the single vaccines rose. But in September 1998, the British government withdrew the importation licence for the single vaccines, leaving parents with the ‘MMR or Nothing’ option.

Andrew Wakefield says that when he asked the Health Protection Agency why they had done this, they responded, ‘...if we allowed parents the choice of single measles vaccines it would destroy our MMR programme.’ He says ‘The government's concern appeared to be to protect the MMR programme over and above the protection of children.’ Is this not a valid criticism?

The lofty statist may despise the parents who wanted the single vaccine and went to great lengths to obtain it for their children. My critic here compares them to people who ‘hear voices’, a nasty sneer which is a good example of his lack of generosity in argument or his willingness to see people as individual humans rather than as pieces on a utopian chessboard.

The whole core of this argument is that I do not share this view. I understand the urgency of their worry, and see them as trying to do the best for their children. In a way, his strange statement that Thalidomide was ‘safe – for the person taking it’ is most revealing. The ‘person taking it’ is the mother. The person damaged is the child of that mother. What sort of mechanical mind is it that can separate the two? By the way, the dangers of Thalidomide were exposed by ‘maverick’ scientists, William McBride and Widukind Lenz. Frances Oldham Kelsey, in the USA - another ‘maverick’ - withstood powerful pressure from a major drug company to license Thalidomide.

Now, I’m quite prepared to believe and accept that the single vaccine is less effective than the MMR, even though I think the evidence for this is pretty slender and the difference probably rather slight. One argument offered by the state is as follows :’Single vaccines imported into this country have not been independently tested for potency and toxicity - we have evidence that some of the single vaccines are less effective or less safe than MMR.’ ‘Some of’ means ‘not all’. Well, that difficulty would easily have been resolved by the NHS continuing to supply the single vaccine under its own control, and ensuring that those used were of good quality.

The parents who were worried were in my experience responsible and thoughtful people who would not have sloppily failed to follow through with appointments, as is always alleged against them.

But even if all these allegations are true , these parents were simply not prepared to let their children be given the MMR. So the real choice wasn’t between the MMR and a less reliable single vaccine. It was between the MMR and nothing, thanks to the dictatorial rigidity of the state, which offered no other choice. My critics on this matter never acknowledge this truth, or deal with it. They swerve round it, again and again and again and again. This is because it is true and unanswerable. His response to this point is not to challenge or rebut it but to claim he cannot understand it, call it ‘perverse’ and splutter abuse about ‘idiots’ and ‘rigid minds’. The reader will not generally notice that, as this spittle-bomb noisily explodes, the actual point at issue is not addressed. I’d go further. I’m not even sure Mr Ward, carried away by the surge of bile flowing through his mind at this point, knows he hasn’t addressed it. Well, he hasn’t. I don’t blame him. It is, for him and his side, insurmountable.

Anyone who has the faintest human sympathy, and who regards his fellow-creatures as individuals with feelings and minds, rather than as numbers , would have known immediately that the effect of offering this false choice would have been what it was. A very large number of families simply did not have their children immunised. I said at the time, and repeated it when it happened, that if and when there was a measles epidemic, it would be the fault of the rigid, machine-minds of the government.

Of course, in an authoritarian state (which I suspect some of these people would prefer) the children would simply have been seized by the authorities and jabbed against their parents’ wishes.

No doubt this would have achieved the ‘herd immunity’ (the phrase speaks volumes about the authorities’ view of us) which the state desires. But for me that is too high a price to pay. Is it for my opponents? Let them say.

In my view, the false choice of ‘MMR or nothing’ was a failed attempt at coercion. It failed because it was authoritarian, rigid and unfeeling, as are the author of this attack on me and his supporters.. They are angry because it failed, angry with the annoying human fallibility of the people who will not do as they are told by the almighty, benevolent Big Brother state. They are also angry because a free press is still prepared to give publicity to whistle blowers and dissenters from orthodoxy (who by their nature cannot always be right, but will be sometimes, and then it be really important that they are heard) and snarl at this freedom as ‘irresponsibility’. Well, too bad. Freedom is irresponsible, by its nature. That is why Thomas Jefferson wrote it into the American Bill of Rights, because he knew that the cold, marble minds of the governing class could never grasp this.

A compliant, obedient silence and the nervous suppression of all doubt would be much, much worse.

For the authoritarian, the only thing wrong with this was that the attempted coercion failed, and was not complete. For the lover of liberty, unmoved by utopian claims that the kindly state guarantees our health (which it of course does not, leaving us to die of thirst in puddles of our own filth in ill-run hospitals), it is wrong in principle.

A few notes. My critic’s comparison of worried parents with delusional mentally ill people tells us more about him than he meant to say. He doesn’t deal with my point that the authorities and their media patsies nowadays exaggerate the danger from measles, though they do (though not as much as they exaggerated the risks of AIDS or VCJD, which, if the authorities had been right about its cause, would by now be a deadly mass pandemic). He himself says that measles *causes* various nasty complications. It would be more accurate ( and a good deal more ‘scientific’, I should have thought) to say that it *can* cause them. Mostly, it doesn’t.

Also, please note an interesting contrast here. The terrors of measles are played up and in my view exaggerated. But when I raise the horrors of regressive autism , my critic says ‘the terribleness of it is irrelevant to whether this terrible thing was caused by MMR’. I have a feeling this is what is called ‘having it both ways’.

This is typical of the medical totalitarian approach, in which the benevolent state claims to protect us from all kinds of terrors, in the hope that we will like it more. The same technique, of exaggerated danger, is used to get us to support wars. It’s easy to see why Ex-Comrade Aaronovitch, the would-be conqueror of Iraq, is keen on this cause.

I doubt very much whether immunisation could ever certainly reduce measles death rates to zero, not least because of religious objections to vaccination and to the unavoidable existence of people who were (for instance) taking immuno-suppressant drugs and so unable to be immunised. I’m also interested to know if he thinks that the Dutch fundamentalists who refuse all vaccinations should be compelled to change their ways, or allowed to choose. He says confidently that the two children who died in Dublin would have lived had they been immunised. Really – when one had this terrible malformation, rather likely to be fatal in any case, and the other was, in effect, starving? In any case, we do not know for certain that they had not been immunised.

He accuses me of the ‘post hoc ergo propter hoc (‘x follows y, therefore x is caused by y’) fallacy in my discussion of the Edwards family. This is proof he has not read what I have written, presumably thanks to the usual red mist of fury that so many of my opponents suffer when confronted with views different from their own. I am most careful to say, specifically, that Josh’s suffering, appalling and worrying as it is, doesn’t prove anything. I’ll leave it at that for now. Except to say that, yes, I have in fact visited the Third World.

I’m asked for my thoughts on the measles outbreak in Swansea. I’m not sure quite why, as most readers here will know my views on the MMR controversy.

I've not been asked for my thoughts on Arsène Wenger, but most of my readers will know my views on him: he should hire Wayne Rooney to play in goal for Spurs. My readers will also know that I know about as much about football as Peter Hitchens knows about science.

Perhaps there’s some intended suggestion that I am in some way responsible for this outbreak, which is also being attributed by some to a long-ago local newspaper campaign against the MMR vaccination. The local newspaper, I should add, says that it covered the controversy fairly, which I have no reason to doubt. I was interested to hear its current editor rather aggressively and righteously questioned on the subject by a BBC presenter the other day.

I think the suggestion is that all ill-informed journalists who've reported irresponsibly on MMR bear some responsibility for the current outbreak.

Longstanding readers will know that I was myself mysteriously targeted, some years ago, by a skilful anonymous letter writer who faked a letter from a mother claiming that her child’s terrible illness was my fault. As it turned out, the woman whose identity the fraud had stolen (and whom I eventually traced) confirmed that no such thing had taken place. Nor, of course, had she written the letter sent to me with her signature faked upon it. The address from which the letter was sent was also a fake, though a very clever and carefully-planned fake which I only uncovered by going to visit it personally, a step the fraud did not think I would take.

The elaborate faking of the letter, the invention of a real-seeming address, the use of an actual name, have always seemed to me quite sinister and unpleasant. And it is things like this, rather than the science of the matter, which have continued to make me question the behaviour of those who petulantly insisted that the MMR injection was the only option for worried parents. I am still astonished that the supposedly beloved National Health Service, every inch of which is paid for by the public, treats the parents of children in this high-handed way. If it is the people’s service, a national benefit, surely its loyalty is above all to those who use it? Is the state our servant or our master?

The fake letter is indeed sinister and unpleasant but was almost certainly the action of a particular individual whose motives we can only guess at. It has no bearing whatsoever on the question on the validity of the National Health Service position that the MMR injection was the only option. The state is our servant, but the mechanisms for providing instructions to our servant are necessarily quite complex and highly regulated. An individual or a group of individuals can't simply demand that the state do whatever barmy thing they've just thought of. I consider myself fortunate to live in a country where this is the case.

If it is our servant, it should sympathise with our fears. Yet, while public money could not, apparently, be used for single jabs, it could be used to pay generous bonuses to doctors who increased the uptake of MMR, and it could be used for propaganda campaigns telling parents that all was well. Yet the Chief Minister of the government which used tax money for these purposes refused to reveal if his own small child had been given the MMR which his ministers and civil servants were vigorously pressing on everyone else.

Depends what you mean by "sympathize". I sympathize with people who hear voices telling them that they have been chosen for a special purpose in life. I don't share their delusions or base my policy towards such people on their delusions. (NB I am NOT saying here that MMR opponents are psychotic. I am saying that their fears have no basis in reality.)

Another of the authorities’ tactics has been to over-rate the importance of immunisation. They suggest wrongly that the main defence against measles is immunisation, when (see below) history shows that it was general improvements in public health, especially in nutrition, housing and the availability of clean water, which reduced the numbers of measles deaths from thousands to a tiny few, before any vaccine was brought into use. Linked with this is a tendency to exaggerate the dangers of measles. In rare cases, measles can without doubt be very damaging. But in most cases it is not. And the rare measles deaths which take place in the modern era tend to involve patients who are already gravely ill or otherwise vulnerable for separate reasons (such as chemotherapy making immunisation impossible).

Given the possibility, also discussed below, that a small minority of patients may react badly to any vaccination, this is an important point in calculating risks.

It has actually occurred to all the stupid scientists who work in the field that medical interventions have risks and benefits and that we need to be sure about where the balance lies before rolling out national programmes. Sometimes, as with some types of cancer screening, it is very difficult to decide exactly where the balance lies and the debate continues. In the case of MMR, however, it is perfectly clear where the balance lies. The benefits far exceed any possible risk.

Before quoting my January 2001 article, I should make a historic point. It was written when the dispute over the safety of the MMR was already in full swing and had not been resolved. I doubt very much if it influenced even one person in deciding whether to give their child the MMR or not. It certainly was not intended to do so. Many parents had already declined the MMR and were unconvinced by official assurances of its safety. They may have been mistaken in this view, but their fears were reasonable at the time.

In March 1998 The Medical Research Council concluded there was no evidence showing a link between the MMR jab and bowel disease or autism. In April 1998, a 14-year Finnish study found no danger associated with the MMR vaccine. In 1999 Research published in the Lancet from the Royal Free Hospital, where Wakefield did his research, found no evidence or an MMR - autism link. The "dispute over the safety of the MMR" was in full swing in the pages of the Daily Mail and other newspapers, but anyone who knew what they were talking about was insisting that the MMR vaccine was safe.

An experienced doctor’s public doubts about the vaccine had been considered so significant by medical journalists and news outlets that a controversy had by then continued for three years (though, as I show below, it goes back even further than that). This is not itself unreasonable. Medical treatments can go wrong. Vaccines can have problems. Should reporters or media suppress such worries? Surely the default position, in a free society, is to publicise them. What if they had been justified, but suppressed?

When one maverick is saying one thing and almost the entire scientific establishment are saying another, then reporters have a responsibility not to suppress anything but to report the maverick views in their proper context. Now that Wakefield has been so thoroughly discredited, there is no excuse whatsoever for journalist reporting his views as though they had any remaining credibility - especially when doing so may result in death or injury to children.

As a parent myself, I sympathised then, and sympathise now with those parents who were worried. It is a very heavy responsibility to authorise an injection, in the fear that it may unpredictably do permanent and irreversible damage. The chance may be very small. The authorities may be saying that it does not exist. But if it is your child, you won’t necessarily be convinced by such words. Any parent will know this. Many non-parents will simply not understand.

So why not find out the facts and use your power as a journalist to help them understand?

I say now what I said at the time and have always said. If the true aim of the authorities was the maximum possible level of immunity, they should have authorised single jabs on the NHS while the controversy was still continuing. My view is that events show that , if maximum immunity was their true aim, they went about it in a very odd way. The predictable ( and predicted) effects of what they did were – as we now know – a significant number of children who were never immunised.

Single jabs are less effective, cause more distress to the children, have far fewer data on their safety, and result in far more missed appointments. Even more importantly, if the authorities had authorized single jabs, this would have given the impression that there were real doubts about the safety of MMR. It is unethical to offer a treatment which has less evidence of safety when a better product with much more robust evidence of safety is available. Moreover, given all the considerations described, it is more than likely that the provision of single jabs would have resulted in fewer children being protected.

It seems to me that what they wanted above all was to get their way. The fact that this involved a number of parents refusing the MMR, could perhaps be blamed not on their inflexibility, but on the wicked media. QED.

It is outrageous to suggest that the medical and scientific establishment had any other considerations in mind than the best way of protecting children.

The current events in Swansea and elsewhere were entirely predictable 12 years ago, and I predicted them. Exhortation and official reassurance were never going to work. A significant minority of parents would not let their children have the MMR, but would unhesitatingly have given them single jabs. Had this happened, there would now be no Swansea measles outbreak, or it would be much smaller (no injection has a 100% success rate, even when given twice, as the MMR is).

Almost certainly untrue - see above.

Here I will reproduce the very first thing I recall writing on the subject, and the earliest of my writings about it that I can find in any archive, which was in the Mail on Sunday on 28th January 2001. It was published under the headline ‘ Is it Really Our Duty to risk our children’s lives with this Jab?’, and it followed Anthony Blair’s refusal to say if he planned to let his small son Leo have the injection, at the height of the controversy over its safety. It read ‘Many mothers would die to save their children's lives, and many would kill anyone who threatened their young with danger. But now they are being asked to risk their own offspring for the sake of others. You may be worried about your own child, say the authorities, but your fears are groundless and actually rather selfish. Be responsible. Overcome them. Trust us, for we know better. This is an astonishing piece of State bossiness in an age that has seen a catalogue of mistakes, panics and mysteries in the world of disease and medicine.

They were not being asked to risk their own offspring for the sake of others. They were being asked to vaccinate their own offspring for the sake of their own offspring. Yes, the world is complicated and some people do know better than you (or me) about all sorts of things. There is, of course, no absolute guarantee than any particular expert in something is right but science is a collaborative enterprise that produces a consensus reflecting the best evidence we have at any particular time. Even then the consensus MAY be wrong, but it's the best source of information there is. The alternative - listening to people who don't know what they are talking about and just make stuff up - is much worse.

They told us thalidomide was safe.

It is - for the person taking it. Unfortunately they didn't test drugs properly for effects on developing embryos in those days. Now they do.

They said that we would all get AIDS.

No they didn't. They said that you risk getting AIDS if you have unprotected sex. You do.

Official advice on avoiding cot death switched from 'babies must lie on their fronts' to 'babies must lie on their backs' with barely an apology.

Yes. Because science - unlike your immutable prejudices - is based on evidence. When new evidence comes in, science changes to reflect that new evidence. That's why science gets better and better all the time whereas stuff people just make up or think doesn't.

The wise person responds with deep caution to the words 'Trust me, I'm a doctor', and with even more caution to the words 'Trust us, we're the Government'.

The wise person either becomes an expert him/herself or puts his trust in the the current expert consensus. The fool places his/her trust on something s/he read in the newspaper.

The same authorities who refuse even to consider that there might be a risk from the Mumps, Measles and Rubella (MMR) vaccine have embarked on a massacre of cattle, and on slaughter and hygiene regulations which have crippled the entire beef industry, when there is still no actual proof that eating BSE-infected meat leads to CJD.

We don't "prove" things in science - you can only do that in maths or logic. We gather evidence and develop well supported theories. There is overwhelming evidence that eating BSE-infected meat leads to vCJD - though vCJD is (mercifully) relatively rare.

But they demand conclusive proof of danger before they will even entertain doubts about MMR. They shout 'bad science' at Andrew Wakefield, the consultant who has persistently raised questions about MMR. Yet nearly half the health professionals questioned by the British Medical Journal say they have concerns about children being given the second of the two required MMR jabs. Surely they, with their long and careful training and education, can recognise 'bad science' when they see it? And what about Tony Blair, who refuses to say if he will follow his own Government's advice when little Leo comes up for his first MMR any day now? If it's so wonderfully safe, why not give a lead to us all?

Yep. Blair's behaviour was indefensible - only valid point in this entire diatribe.

This weekend the triple vaccine is being urged on every parent of small children through a £3million propaganda campaign, mounted at our expense in breezy defiance of unproved but frightening suggestions that MMR could be behind a sudden increase in childhood autism. Most GPs back the Government line, though this may have something to do with the fact that doctors can increase their annual income by £860 if they achieve a 70 per cent take-up of the jab, and by £2,580 if they can reach 90 per cent.

The pressure is strong. If you don't let us immunise your child, says the Government, you could help cause an epidemic of measles. And don't imagine that measles is just a few spots. This is a serious disease which can kill. The Department of Health speaks of the 'devastating brain-destroying impact of measles in young children', known as SSPE, which sometimes accompanies measles.

Yet it is the devastating brain-destroying impact of autism which is so worrying for the parent who hovers at the surgery door, wondering whether to submit a cheerful, healthy toddler to MMR.

There is no proof that MMR causes or has ever caused autism, or the severe bowel disorder Crohn's disease which can lead to brain damage.

Again, "proof" is not a relevant concept here. There is no credible evidence that MMR causes or has ever caused autism, or the severe bowel disorder Crohn's disease and there is overwhelming evidence that MMR does NOT cause autism, or Crohn's disease.

But both of these afflictions have become more common since the triple MMR was introduced in 1988,

A questionable claim, but one that is irrelevant given the detailed and large scale epidemiological investigations which have been carried out.

and they have brought unutterable misery to many families. Heartbroken parents speak of how they have 'lost' their children even though they are still alive. Toddlers who were alert, responsive, full of laughter and recognition, suddenly went quiet, and retreated into an unknown world where they are no longer the people they were or might have become.

It is indeed terrible when such a thing happens to a toddler, but the terribleness of it is irrelevant to whether this terrible thing was caused by MMR.

Imagine wondering for the rest of your life whether you were to blame for such a thing happening to your own child. You cannot know, but you will always suspect. Because the decision on whether to inject or not was yours alone, this would be far worse than coping with the random, unpredictable ravages of a disease. It is an awful choice, and those who must take it need not propaganda, but help.

But why would any parent wonder such a thing unless that parent had been misled by a dishonest doctor and credulous journalists who insist on spreading that doctor's lies?

Why do they not get help?

Why do journalists not give them the help they need - accurate easy-to-understand facts.

Why do parents have to take this decision at all? The alleged autism risk is linked entirely to the joint use of the three vaccines in one go.

A false and thoroughly discredited allegation.

If there is a connection it is possibly because three viruses at once overload the child's small frame.

No! Again, scientists consider such possibilities, and they understand how the immune system works. Three attenuated viruses at once do not overload a child's small frame.

While we find out for certain, why not let worried parents have single vaccines, spread over time?

See above.

The official answer to this is astonishingly thin. Parents are told that huge studies - especially a recent one in Finland - have shown no link between MMR and autism. But the Finnish study, it turns out, was not really looking for any such link so it is no great surprise that it did not find one.

Asked to explain its rigid refusal to leave a loophole for worried mothers and fathers, the Health Department brusquely proclaims: 'The Government recommends the use of MMR because the evidence is that combined MMR is better for children than separate vaccines. There is evidence that separating the vaccines puts children unnecessarily at risk of diseases that have serious complications. Recommendations on MMR vaccines are categorically not based on financial considerations, nor do they aim to deny parental choice. We cannot offer parents the choice of an unsafe and unproved option when a safer and more effective vaccine exists. The Department must make recommendations based on the best scientific evidence and the advice of experts and this is that MMR is the safest way to protect children against these diseases. For this fundamental reason we cannot support the use of single dose vaccines.' Dr Jayne Donegan, a sceptical London GP, says the official position about this is confused and self-defeating. The reason for the current panic is that fears of MMR have led to a severe drop in the take-up, down to levels of 75 per cent, which are not enough to insure against an epidemic. If this is so, she points out, then the urgent task is to get as many children immunised against measles as possible. By making the single measles vaccine available easily in this country, the Government could get levels back up to 90 per cent. Even with a six-month gap between jabs, toddlers could then be immunised against the more distant dangers of rubella and mumps within less than two years.

And she asks: 'Why is it safer to give them together?' It is true, she says, that the old Berna-Rubini single mumps vaccine had a poor record. But there is no reason why the new and effective Jerryl Lyn mumps immunisation could not be given on its own. However, you cannot readily get it here except as part of the MMR.

See above.

The Department's fierce statement that the single-vaccine alternative is 'unsafe and unproved' does not seem to be founded on much, and an unkind person might well suspect that this assertion was 'bad science'.

There are far fewer data about the safety of the single-vaccine. This is good science.

Dr Donegan used to be an enthusiast for vaccinations of all kinds, but experience has turned her into a doubter. She believes that the medical establishment is in the grip of an intolerant orthodoxy that will not listen to questioning voices.

But does she have any real evidence for her doubts or any support from the rest of her profession concerning her opinions about "the medical establishment"?

'They think that people who question the vaccine are socially irresponsible. If I say anything critical about vaccines it's as if I were saying that God was dead.' Certainly an act of faith is required. The claims of an MMR risk have not been proved, but nor have they been disproved. There is no reason for either side to be certain, and every reason to be cautious, especially if the future of a tiny child is in your hands. Yet the use of emotional strong-arm tactics comes just as much - if not more - from the pro-injection lobby as it does from the antis.

See "proof" and "overwhelming evidence" above.

Are their scares valid? The MMR enthusiasts make much of recent measles epidemics in Ireland and the Netherlands which involved several thousand children. Dr Donegan says measles is indeed deadly if it attacks badly nourished children living in dirty conditions, or if it affects those who are already seriously ill. She says most health improvements, even the ones credited to vaccination, are really due to the march of civilisation. In an advanced country with clean food and water, fresh fruit and vegetables readily available, and modern, spacious housing, she believes measles is unlikely to be fatal for healthy youngsters.

What Dr Donegan believes is irrelevant. There is ample statistical evidence about how many otherwise healthy children are likely to die or become disabled in a measles outbreak.

Normal, fit people can suffer severely or even die from measles, but such deaths are rare. The Netherlands recently suffered an epidemic in the country's rural 'Bible Belt', where vaccination of all kinds is frowned upon. There were three deaths among the 3,300 who caught the disease. One two-year-old had underlying heart problems, but the two other victims, a three-year-old and a 17-year-old, died from measles complications.

And those three children would be alive today if their parents had vaccinated their children.

The two measles deaths in Ireland's epidemic last year suggest that Dr Donegan has a point. One of the victims was a 12-month-old baby girl from a very poor family living in grim conditions on a large Dublin housing estate and was, incredibly for a European capital in the year 2000, malnourished. The other was also exceptional and seriously ill before he contracted measles. He was a two-year-old with a severe malformation of the throat which linked his windpipe with his oesophagus and who had to be fed by a tube let into his stomach.

And those two children would be alive today if their parents had vaccinated their children.

The Irish epidemic also revealed another unsettling fact for the 'MMR at all costs' lobby. At least ten per cent of those who developed measles had been given the MMR jab. One in ten is a pretty high failure rate for a treatment that is being pressed on the public as a great social duty.

The failure rate is less than one percent for children who get both MMR jabs. Even if it were lower, herd immunity would protect the unprotected children.

And it is that idea of social duty which really lies at the heart of this argument. The lofty view that 'the health of the people is the highest law' seems to have shoved aside all other thoughts. The authorities, who take more than a third of our income in taxes, are not delivering very much that is good or laudable in return, as the NHS decays into Third World conditions.

Have you ever visited the Third World?

They are anxious to prove to us that they are still benevolent and good: the abolition and defeat of diseases is one of the few ways they now have of doing so. They have made a calculation which leaves no room for doubt and they think we are obliged to help them. Luckily for us, they cannot - yet - make us vaccinate our young. I bet they wish they could, but in the meantime they are forcing the parents of Britain into a deeply unpleasant and completely needless dilemma which may have the opposite effect to the one they intend. If there is a measles epidemic in this country, the rigid minds of the Health Department will have to share the blame for it. ‘

That statement is so perverse, I hardly know how to respond. There is a measles epidemic in this country. It was caused by the rigid minds of one idiot doctor and dozens of idiot journalists.

I still think that, given the state of knowledge when this was written, this is a reasonable summary of the case. I was the only journalist to track the measles deaths in Dublin and find out the true circumstances from the Irish authorities. This would have been impossible in Britain, where my requests for such information on a measles death was brusquely refused, on the spurious grounds of patient confidentiality. I never sought to identify anyone so that cannot be the reason. It is useful to recall that Andrew Wakefield’s original paper in ‘The Lancet’, suggesting that the MMR (introduced in 1988) might have risks, had been published in February 1998, almost three years before I wrote the article. The concerns about the safety of the MMR had already taken hold in the public mind long before I ever uttered a public word about it.

But by the time you wrote, the fears over MMR had already been put to rest. You could (and should) have uttered your public words in favour of vaccination.

In fact, they go back further than the famous press conference which began the controversy. Using an electronic library database, I found that fears over the MMR being linked with autism and bowel disease were raised in newspaper reports in March 1994, January 1996, November 1996, June 1997 and July 1997. In 1992, two of the original MMR vaccines had been withdrawn because of a separate concern over the safety of the mumps component.

Yep. That's what we do if, despite our best efforts, we later discover that vaccines are dangerous or do more harm than good.

I am not going to attempt to go into the rights and wrongs of this controversy now. I can only say that it seemed to me that some legitimate concerns had been raised, and that parents were entitled to be worried. Some personal experiences of mine have made me worry about all claims of total safety for vaccines.

No scientist would ever claim total safety for anything. Your personal experiences are irrelevant. The safety of vaccines is established by the large scale collection of evidence.

Nor is it just personal experience, nor the ghastly experience of Heather Edwards and her son Joshua, which I have often written about, and which haunts me to this day (Joshua had severe reactions after *both* his MMR injections, suffering both regressive autism and grave bowel problems. No, this doesn't prove anything. But it is surely worrying).

What's worrying is that a supposedly intelligent journalist can commit such an obvious case of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. I am very sorry about Joshua, but the epidemiological evidence clearly establishes that he did not develop his conditions as a result of his jabs.

As I noted in July 2007, ‘ I am hugely grateful to Vivienne Parry, a member of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation, which advises the Government on the controversial MMR injection, for finally explaining the true attitude of the authorities: “There's a small risk with all vaccines,” she says. “No one has ever said that any vaccine is completely without side-effects.” “But we have to decide whether the benefits outweigh the risks. If we had measles, it would kill lots of children. If you have a vaccine, it will damage some children, but a very small number.” ‘ As I wrote then: ’It's not really true about measles, a rather minor risk to a healthy child in an advanced country. But what a refreshing change this candour is from the woodenheaded assertions by the medical establishment that the MMR jab is proven to be completely safe.’ The problem here is that governments may regard the ‘small number’ who are damaged as unimportant. But the individuals who are personally and directly affected see it in a very different way.

See above. The benefits of MMR vastly outweigh any risk - for each individual child as well as for the child population as a whole.

I don’t think I have ever met or communicated directly with Andrew Wakefield, though I have corresponded with many people, whose children suffered from bowel complaints and regressive autism, who did meet him and who had and continue to have a high opinion of him as a doctor and a man. I note that many modern accounts of the controversy describe his actions as ‘fraudulent’ or ‘false’ or as a ‘hoax’, suggesting a deliberate attempt to deceive. I don’t personally think this is fair.

Andrew Wakefield's dishonesty has been established beyond any reasonable doubt.

Another doctor ( I won’t name her in case it brings extra trouble to her) who dared to sympathise with worried parents, and whom I believe to be a fine and ethical professional, was also dragged before the General Medical Council for daring to give evidence on behalf of such worried parents. I am glad to say that she was cleared, but not until after she had been put through a professional and emotional ordeal which would have crushed many people.

One of the things which always made me sympathise with the worried parents was the intolerant fury of the pro-MMR campaign, which to this day exaggerates the dangers of measles. The prevalence and dangers of this disease (grave among malnourished people without access to clean water) had already fallen precipitately before the first vaccine was introduced in 1968. Annual Measles deaths in in England and Wales ranged between about 9,000 a year and 12,000 a year before the First World War, rose to a peak of nearly 17,000 in the harshest period of the war (during, and perhaps caused by, the now-forgotten severe food shortages of that period) , fell after the war, at one stage to fewer than 3,000, then rising again to nearly 6,000 before beginning a long, jagged fall to around 100, a level reached in the mid-1950s 13 years before the introduction of any vaccine at all. During the first 60 years of the century, its victims fell from more than 300 deaths per year per million to about two per million. (Older figures show a far higher death rate in the 1840s – 700 per year per million; and again in the 1880s – 600 per year per million. There is a data gap in the 1890s In the five years immediately before the first vaccine, deaths were as follows : 1962:39; 1963:166; 1964:73; 1965:115; 1966:80; 1967:99; 1968:51. To give an indication of the range of possible variations in those times, deaths in 1956 were at 30, while the previous year there had been 176 and in 1957 there were 96, and in 1958, 49. The width of the variation did narrow after 1968, but not vastly. Nor can we be sure that the vaccine was responsible, or wholly responsible, for the subsequent continuing fall in the number of deaths to zero or very near zero, which has been maintained since then. General standards of housing, nutrition and public health were all continuing to rise in that period, which saw the final removal of some of the worst slums. Deaths in subsequent years fell even lower, falling to 6 in 1979. This is obviously an advance. But a) it is really quite small compared with the changes wrought by better nutrition, housing conditions and hygiene achieved in the previous 60 years. And b) it is very hard to say whether it is attributable to the vaccine, or to the continuing improvements in public health which had already had so much effect.

This line of argument makes no sense whatsoever. Yes deaths were reduced by better living conditions. Now we have better living conditions, the only way to reduce deaths further is by vaccination. It is not hard to say what is attributable to the vaccine. Epidemiologists do this for a living. The vaccine (properly deployed) prevents people getting measles at all. If nobody gets measles, nobody dies from or is disabled by measles. The only argument for not vaccinating would be if vaccination cause more harn than good. It doesn't.

Let us all hope and pray that there are no deaths or serious illness as a result of the current measles outbreak.

Indeed! At least, if there is death or serious illness, those of us in the "intolerant orthodoxy" will at least be able to sleep at night knowing we did our best. Will you?

As always, the subject is illuminated more by thought and facts than by dogma and emotion, though it is, in my view, kind to respect the fears of others, and foolish to ignore them.

Even when the fears of others are based on dogma and emotion?

If you want accurate information about medical science and the sorry tale of Dr Wakefield and the MMR scare, I can only suggest that you stop reading the Daily Mail and start reading Bad Science by Ben Goldacre.

PS I've just been taken to task on Twitter for not citing references (other than Ben's book above). I really wanted to avoid rehearsing debates about the detailed scientific evidence because those debates have all been had and the outcome is clear. I wanted to restrict myself to the question of how the advice was derived from the science and how science works. I have, however, alluded to factual evidence concerning the merits of MMR versus single vaccines. If you dispute any of my claims, I would direct you to Public Health England: Why is MMR preferable to single vaccines?. If you don't accept what they have to say then you'll have to start reading the primary literature.

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25 March 2013 12:46 PM

I suppose we shall now have to get used to Tory Politicians incessantly pretending to care about the EU, about mass immigration, about crime and about education. Labour have already begun to do the same (it will be harder for the Liberal Democrats, but even they may get in on the game).

Mr Cameron’s latest supposed ‘pledges’ will, I suspect, swiftly clear away like mist on a sunny day. But by then, no doubt guided by Mr Lynton Crosby’s ‘dog whistle’ techniques (in which parties signal to voters that they hold populist views they haven’t actually expressed and – in my view – don’t actually support either), Mr Cameron will have moved on to another, different but equally vaporous pledge. Mr Crosby is an Australian election genius, who will be well aware of the challenge once offered to Australia’s fake right-wing (‘Liberal’) party, their equivalent to our Tories, by Pauline Hanson. Her One Nation Party had some similarities to UKIP.

For a British government to do as Mr Cameron suggests, it would pretty certainly have to declare independence from the EU, from the Luxembourg Court of Justice and from the Strasbourg Court of Human Rights. These are desirable aims, but we know perfectly well that Mr Cameron and his Cabinet not only won’t take such steps, but actively oppose them.

It would also have to take dictatorial powers over local authorities, and introduce some sort of identity card scheme, which are not desirable.

Stringent border control is the only real answer to this. Once people arrive in this country legally, it is difficult, verging on impossible, to close the welfare system to them. Mass immigration and open borders are, always have been, and always will be incompatible with a free-at-the-point-of-use welfare state, and they’re also pretty hard to manage alongside a system of subsidised public housing based on need. Serious left-wingers really ought, all along, to have been the most stringent opponents of mass immigration, and of the demolition of national border control which EU membership demands.

The odd thing is that Labour has hardly ever, since the death of Hugh Gaitskell, taken an explicitly left-wing line on these issues, instead following fashionable metropolitan liberal opinion, which is quite uninterested in the problems of the British poor. On the contrary, it quietly realises that mass immigration is a powerful force pushing wages down. Imagine how much the minimum wage would have had to rise without Labour’s deliberate importation of hundreds of thousands of eastern Europeans prepared to work very hard for very little. It’s amazing how this very interesting subject is never examined. Yet the often-asserted claim by Labour politicians that the minimum wage has not, as its opponents predicted, destroyed jobs, is taken at face value by people who ought to know better.

Modish metropolitans also benefit personally from mass migration. It makes servants (mainly nannies and cleaners) affordable for the professional middle classes for the first time since 1939 . It also cuts the cost of restaurants and takeaways, essential to a lifestyle in which both the adults in the household go out to work all day, and can’t be bothered to do proper cooking when they get home.

But why is all this banging on about crime, human rights and immigration happening now? Because we are rapidly approaching the Period of Empty Promises, during which the Coalition will break up, and the two Coalition parties will pose, posture and grandstand till they are puce in the face, trying to pretend that they loathe each other, when the truth is that they are indistinguishable. Soon I expect a Tory minority government endlessly ‘banging on’ about all the things UKIP bangs on about, and which Mr Cameron once claimed to despise.

As I wrote back on 25th September 2011, both Tories and Lib Dems have never intended to maintain the Coalition till the end of this Parliament. I said : ‘But the biggest fake of all will be the stage-managed split between the two, which I predict will take place by the spring of 2014.

‘There will be some pretext or other - probably spending cuts. The idea will be to make the Liberals look like principled Leftists and the Tories look like principled conservatives. The media will, as usual, play along.

‘The Liberals will then noisily leave the Coalition but quietly agree to maintain a minority Tory Government on the basis of “confidence and supply”.

‘Mr Cameron will then find ministerial jobs for some of his friends. Mr Clegg may possibly go off to the European Commission - a seat falls vacant in 2014.

‘If he does, I suspect Vince Cable will become leader, a change worth many votes to his party. The Tories will try and fail to get a few 'Right-wing' measures through Parliament.

‘And at the 2015 Election, voters will be asked to choose between Liberal Conservative, Liberal Democrat or Liberal Labour candidates, pretending to disagree with each other.

‘The Liberal Democrats will then form a coalition with whoever gets most seats. And your wishes, hopes and fears will continue to be ignored’

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15 March 2013 4:55 PM

A few thoughts about a curious debate on Thursday night at the Cambridge Union, almost always the sharper of the two great University debating societies. It may be the chamber. The Oxford Union debates in what always seems to be an enormous, freezing sepulchre, with the ceiling lost in gloom, high above. Cambridge has a smaller, more intimate room, in which laughter stands a better chance. It may be Cambridge’s frostier, more astringent climate as compared with Oxford’s melancholy, soft dankness. Or it may just be that this is the way the luck has fallen for me on the dozen or so times I’ve struggled into my decrepit, baggy dinner jacket, and wrenched my annoying red bow tie into place for one of these occasions.

Anyway, last night we were debating New Labour. Had they ruined the country? Well, of course they had helped to do so, and had given the poor old thing a severe shove down the slopes of doom. But they’re hardly the only culprit. It’s a bit like Murder on the Orient Express, with a whole queue of suspects serially plunging the knife into the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, its heirs and successors.

And then again, it’s still the case that if an Oxbridge debating society wants to discuss what’s wrong with Labour, they get Tories to speak for the motion, and Labour people to speak against it. It’s as if it’s a private fight, even though plenty of good patriots loathe the Tories, and plenty of proud socialists loathe Labour. I hesitated over accepting the invitation, as I knew it would mean sharing a bench with Tories, whom I regard as my opponents just as much as Labour. On the other hand, these events don’t decide the fate of the nation, but they may just possibly help people to think – people who in a few years will be in influential positions in our society.

The outgoing President, Ben Kentish, opened for the Labour defence rather naughtily, saying that it was going to be very tough for my side to prove the rather severe proposition ‘New Labour Ruined Britain’. I pointed out to him that since he had written the motion himself , it was he who had set the bar too high for us. If he hadn’t liked it, he could have fixed it. There was also a glorious moment when, after Mr Kentish had been railing for some minutes against the Horrors Of The Evil Thatcher Regime, a rather beautiful woman in the audience asked him sweetly how old he had been at the time. Mr Kentish was forced to admit that he had not yet been born during the Thatcher Terror, which took some of the whizz and bite out of his denunciation.

Hazel Blears, for New Labour, made a silly reference to the fact that all the speakers on the anti-Blair side were ‘white’ (I should have said ‘grey’ was a better description, but there) , and was a bit incommoded when I said that I thought it was time skin colour stopped being important to civilised people. What mattered was the content of their characters. I felt she never quite got her zing back after that, but maybe that was just my conceit.

The Tories, John Redwood and Andrew Mitchell, said pretty much what Tories do say, about the economy and the Gold Reserves, and in Mr Redwood’s case about the EU.

A contributor from the floor, rightly in my view, complained that the old-fashioned Left had no advocate among the main speakers.

So, when it came to my turn, I thought that I could, to some extent, put that right. Amazingly, you might think, nobody had so far mentioned the Iraq invasion. I did, and was slightly amazed to find Andy Burnham jumping up and asking righteously if I wished Saddam Hussein was still in power. I said (which is true) that I supposed that was the implication of what I said, since I was against invading other people’s countries to change their governments. But I did also point out that the Blair creature had said clearly during the preparations for the invasion that his aim was not to topple Saddam (Chapter and verse, for those interested : 25th February 2003, Blair: ‘I do not want war. I do not believe anyone in this House wants war. But disarmament peacefully can only happen with Saddam’s active co-operation. I detest his regime but *even now he can save it* (my emphasis) by complying with United Nations demands …the path to peace is clear’ (House of Commons Hansard)) . Blair got into a similar mess about Slobodan Milosevic, and had had to be rescued from his militancy by a NATO spokesman in April 1999, after first calling for Milosevic to ‘step down’ . I also tried to undermine some New Labour piffle about the marvellous NHS by contrasting it with the catastrophe of the Stafford hospital scandal, showing as it does that pouring billions into a nationalised health service does not automatically improve the health of the people.

But I also turned on the Tories, for complaining about the Labour surrender to the EU when they were only additions to surrenders made during the Thatcher and Major years. I also mocked their noisy complaints about Gordon Brown’s sale of the gold reserves, by pointing out that, at the time, the Tory front bench did nothing, and it was left to the eminent backbencher Sir Peter Tapsell to raise the matter in the Commons. This was typical of the supine state of the Tory party in the face of New Labour for most of its existence (they did of course fail to oppose the Iraq adventure). As I said, the first New Labour government was really the John Major government.

Perhaps I was too keen to peel off the many left-wingers there, to concentrate on the whole conservative indictment. I mentioned identity cards and detention without trial, and the attack on the constitution, but clean forgot to mention mass immigration. Was this a Freudian memory slip? Who knows? By the way, the whole thing was recorded and will sooner or later be put up on the web, and I acknowledge that this is a wholly partial account which concentrates very much on my own contribution.

Anyway, the result was interesting – an enormous number of abstentions, many fewer votes for New Labour, and even fewer for the motion itself, though the margin wasn’t that great. The abstentions, in effect, won, which is rather an unusual outcome. I like to think that the Left-wingers there decided they would rather abstain than support that tawdry government, though they certainly weren’t going to vote with Tories. I also like to think (after some post-debate conversations) that I may have encouraged them to do so. Unscrupulous? I don’t think so. I did oppose the Iraq war. I did oppose identity cards and detention without trial. On such things I’m quite willing to form alliances with opponents, as they rise above other issues. It’s an interesting exercise, both for Cambridge undergraduates who probably loathe me as a right-wing monster, and for me as someone who believes a new coalition in politics is possible, in consorting with the enemy, and wondering where the true boundaries really lie in British politics.

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11 February 2012 10:05 PM

As the age of sexual consent is 16, what are state employees doing fitting contraceptive implants in 13-year-old girls? Aren’t they colluding in a criminal act?

These sinister devices are a clear admission by the Government. It actually expects these children to have unlawful sexual intercourse, and wants to make it easy for them.

How strange, given that the one crime we all disapprove of utterly and completely is paedophilia. Even convicted gangsters, rapists, burglars and muggers look down on the paedophiles in their midst (they have another word for them, as they cannot spell or pronounce the official term).

Those who engage in paedophilia are often also accused of ‘grooming’, preparing their victims for violation and abuse.

Yet here we have a policy that directly condones and encourages the sexualisation of children, and is at the very least comparable to the ‘grooming’ we are all so shocked by.

What child, equipped with this rather revolting chemical lump or dose, would not grasp that she was expected by the authorities to act accordingly? I would be very interested to know exactly what the victims of this scheme are told, and how they are chosen.

This thing is done by doctors and nurses, supposedly symbols of rectitude and mercy. It often takes place in schools, where our children are meant to be safe from molesters. It is protected by law. It is paid for by your taxes and mine, extracted under the threat of prison.

Perhaps most sinister of all, it is – like all child-molesting – ‘our little secret’. The girls’ parents are not asked their permission beforehand for their daughters to be corrupted by our sick state. Nor are they told afterwards. This is both totalitarian and evil.

The judges are always ready to confirm that this is no longer a Christian country in anything but name, and did so again on Friday – though I do wonder where they think our laws and their powers come from.

But it is much worse than that. We are turning into a sort of Babylon, only with drizzle and sleet. Almost every sexual practice and habit – with the single exception of faithful marriage – is now encouraged by the state.

First, the state poisons young minds with so-called sex-education, which is now unleashed in primary schools. Then, when the poor things act on what they have been told, doctors push chemical anti-baby capsules under their skin. I believe this sort of thing is known as ‘harm reduction’.

It all depends what you mean by harm. Having privatised the telephones, electricity and the railways, we have nationalised paedophilia.

West is making things worse for Syria's victimsThe BBC is working hard to get us to go to war in Syria. Its incessant coverage is – as it was in Libya and Egypt – mostly dim, partial and unquestioning. This should cease.

If there is a rebellion against a dictatorship, then it must, as far as the BBC is concerned, be noble. If a government defends itself against rebellion, it must, according to the BBC, be wrong.

Great slabs of history tell us that this is not necessarily so. In this case, I tremble for the fate of Syria’s Arab Christians if the Assad regime falls.Bad is often replaced by worse. This is already happening in Egypt and Libya, though the BBC seldom troubles to record the aftermath of the ‘Arab Spring’ it welcomed so simple-mindedly.

Perhaps the Corporation is trying to please our Foreign Secretary, William Hague, an increasingly pathetic figure who seems to have mistaken military intervention in foreign countries for conservatism. Someone should also ask him why he gets so outraged about Syria, and was not outraged by equally bloody repression in Bahrain.

It seems that, having been refused UN permission to destabilise Damascus under the blue flag, we are now looking at running guns to the rebels. What British interest is served by this dangerous policy?

The revolt in Syria would long ago have faded away had it not been for the noisy support of Washington and London. Much of the bloodshed and destruction is, I believe, the responsibility of the ‘West’, which has falsely encouraged naive people to believe that Nato helicopters and bombers are just over the horizon.

ID cards: the spectre's still lurkingSince identity cards were abolished long ago, why do we still have an ‘Identity and Passport Service’?

I asked the Home Office, and they treated it as a silly question and snapped dismissively that it would cost too much to change the name. I said I was sure that the plaque on the Home Secretary’s door didn’t still say ‘Alan Johnson’, but they didn’t get the joke. Then I asked the

Department for Education, as it is now known, how much it had cost to get rid of the stupid New Labour name it used to have. For the entire department (far bigger than the Passport Office), it cost £8,995, small change in Government terms.

So why do we still have an ‘Identity and Passport Service’? I wonder if identity cards have really gone for good.

What the Dickens?Sad to think, as we mark the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Dickens, that hardly anyone will still read his books 50 years from now.

What with mass ‘dyslexia’ (otherwise known as very bad reading teaching), and the takeover of childish imaginations by TV and the internet, reading books for pleasure will soon be as rare as seedcake and clay pipes.

You can't replace warships with empty wordsThe more David Cameron rattles his rusty sabre, the more I fear for the Falklands. Margaret Thatcher nearly lost them, by proposing to scrap much of the Navy and withdrawing HMS Endurance. Luckily for her, the Argentinians didn’t wait till we had sold or melted down the ships that formed the Task Force, or she’d be a footnote.

Now, we could not possibly take the islands back if we lost them again, and I am not convinced we are strong enough to hold them against a determined attack.

We also have many fewer friends in the world than we had in 1982. I dread waking up one morning and hearing that Port Stanley is once again in Argentine hands.

Mr Cameron hopes to look tough by boasting about ship deployments. But while I don’t want to give too much away, our ships may not be well suited to the task they face. And they can’t stay for ever.

He should boast less, and try to rebuild the Navy he has cut so clumsily, before it is too late.